The Magnificent Leopard: A Review

October 9, 2006

Watching The Leopard it was hard for me not to think of Orson Welles' mutilated film, The Magnificent Ambersons. Thematically and stylistically the two films are twins. Both represent careful historical reconstructions, The Leopard being a portrait of 19th century Sicily in the throes of political change, and The Magnificent Ambersons a portrait of America at a cultural crossroads. Both filmmakers approached their subject with a deep store of sentiment.. but not nostalgia, as the changes are inevitable and the representatives of the old order partially to blame for their own troubles. Both films are based on a novel; both (at least in their original versions) extend to about three hours in length. The Leopard upon its release in the United States was butchered pretty badly and promoted as a vehicle for Burt Lancaster. Thankfully, the original Italian version directed by Luchino Visconte is preserved. With The Magnificent Ambersons we were not quite as fortunate.. the original version was destroyed. But The Leopard manages to give a sense of the kind of complete and bittersweet work that Orson Welles had in mind.. but lost.

The Leopard comes out of the heady years of Italian cinema. Listening to the music I thought I detected the sound of a Fellini film, and sure enough the music was by Nino Rota, Fellini's collaborator. It is as if the artistry of the high modern films of Fellini or Antonioni got channeled into a historical epic.. something belonging more properly to some earlier era of filmmaking.. but now brought forward to the present.. and alive with all the strength and natural grace that we expect from the aging and aristocratic protagonist of the film. The world will shortly be filled with jackals and hyenas.. but this is a masterful creature.

The landscape for The Leopard is California-like, with its dry golden mountains. In an American film, anything that looks like California probably is California, drafted to stand for some foreign locale. But this was obviously not California, this was different: Mediterranean Sicily. Into this unique landscape comes change, and the old noble family of Prince Salina (Burt Lancaster) must make new unaccustomed choices in the new world. Tancredi (Alain Delon) is the scion who embraces the new Italy.. marrying a beautiful representative of it who happened to come with a store of new wealth. But the Prince stays aloof, and while recognizing the tide of change.. and its inevitable outcome.. is too proud to bend. It is a scrappy and poor ancient landscape, and the Leopard is hardly going to change its spots.

The film is filled with grand scenes, but still somehow feels small and careful.. not at all what you might expect from a film that belong properly in the genre of Gone with the Wind. We expect such films to be impersonal.. to reach beyond the vision of a mere director.. but Visconte has made something quite personal here. It is a trick also performed in the scenes that remain from the Magnificent Ambersons, which returned Welles to memories and places in his past. I would even say that these are the only two films I know of which successfully tame the epic grandeur into a personal vision of loss and destruction.